"I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it." -- Trump, 12/11/18

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand, if the rate of inflation is such that Social Security recipients are not getting a cost-of-living increase, then it's kind of hard to see why other people paid by the federal government are getting pay raises.

On the other hand, Jimmy Carter tried to fight inflation by limiting federal pay raises for everyone to 5.5% at a time when inflation went to over double that. It didn't help worth a damn and the anger towards him by the federal work force was very real. Between that and coming dangerously close to having a "payless payday" in October for a couple years running, there was a real sense that neither Carter nor the Congress gave a fuck for the people who do the nation's dirty work.

Sometimes I wonder if Obama has an inner compass that is guiding him down the path of the Carter presidency. His caving into ham-handed efforts to reach out to the Party of No may result in a primary challenger in 2012. Which would be a signal that he is on track to be a one-term president.

Obama had better find his balls real soon now, and I don't mean the ones he throws through basketball hoops. If he seriously thinks that the GOP is willing to work with him on anything, then he is arguably seriously delusional. Playing three-dimensional chess is one thing, but 3-D chess is not a good idea when your opponent shows up with automatic weapons and shoots up the chess board and the room.

The war was about slavery. The poor Southerners knew it at the time, which is why draft dodging and desertion were epidemic in the South. In areas of the South away from the plantations, men went north to fight for their country, not for the rich planters. In those areas, the Confederate press gangs had to go around with a heavy armed escort to preclude being captured and hung by the locals. It was why many Southerners regarded the war as a "rich man's war, a poor man's fight."

No, it was only a generation or two after the war that this "noble cause" bullshit began to be shoveled about. And it has only been in the last century or less that the apologists for the traitorous rebels have been trying to walk away from the brutal fact that their ancestors fought, first and foremost, to preserve slavery.

You cannot defend the Confederacy without defending slavery. To do so is like defining water as "a molecule made up of one atom of oxygen and two atoms of something else."

If your unemployment benefits are about to run out and you face eviction, here is a modest suggestion:

Get a few blankets and a pillow and then go camp out in the offices of your local Republican congressman or senator. If your local congressional delegation are all Democrats, then find out where the state or local offices are of your state Republican party and go camp there. Hang around the lunch room and when people are eating, start asking them: "Hey, you gonna finish that?"

Or show up and tell them that you are there to work and ask them to show you to a desk.

6.2 million workers have been unemployed longer than 26 weeks. The unemployment rate is well over 10%, when you factor in those people who have been so beaten down that they have stopped looking for a job.

My laptop, which has Win7 Pro, keeps bugging me to install an update that is 28Mb in size. It is the "Microsoft.NET Framework 4 Client Profile." The rationale for it seems to be mostly gobbledygook about "running client programs" and "faster deployment of Windows Presentation Technology," whatever the hell that means.

That seems like a stretch to me. Wikileaks has taken up arms against nobody. There is not a shred of evidence that they have done anything other than air the dirty laundry of the U.S.

In fact, one can make the argument that much of what Wikileaks has done has been helpful to the U.S. Wikileaks has put out in the open the muttered innuendo about the corruption of the Afghan government. It has laid bare the fact that Pakistan has been supporting the Taliban all along.

Nobody should be surprised to learn that Silvio Burlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, is pretty much a clown, or that Russia is a kleptocracy. Anyone who is astonished that the Arab nations despise Iran hasn't been paying much attention. If someone is shocked that one of the functions of diplomats is to gather intelligence, then they need to have a custodial guardian appointed for them. Is it astonishing to anyone that South Korea is doing contingency planning in the event that North Korea implodes? Does anyone not understand that Iran has been in bed with North Korea, or that North Korea will sell anything to anybody for cash?

My sense of it is that this latest data dump will be more of a flash in the pan than anything else. Which won't stop the blowhards in our government from hyperventilating about it, just as they did for the previous two data dumps, where they predicted all sorts of Bad Things Will Happen, none of which did.

_______________________________________* But maybe we should look at Mr. King's argument. After all, he was a supporter of the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles, when the IRA was engaged in planting bombs and killing civilians. He had no difficulty with allying himself with a terrorist group back then.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

But nobody seems to be asking this: Assuming that there has been one source for the material, PFC Bradley Manning, how the fuck is it that a single Army E-3 had access to all of this shit?

Why did an Army anybody have access to State Department cables going back over 30 years? What the hell ever happened to compartmentalizing classified material?

Back in the day (my day), you had to have two things in order to see classified documents: The proper security clearance and the need to know. If a radioman with a top secret clearance walked up to Sonar Control and had asked for a book on the acoustic signatures of Soviet submarines, he'd have been thrown out on his ear and then reported up the chain of command. I had some pretty goddamned high level security clearances and there was no frakking way that I could have seen State Department cables because I didn't have (let's say it all together, class) a need to know.

Which, from a security perspective, is pretty fucked up. And that doesn't even address the point that this dude was able to downloads hundreds of thousands of documents without setting off some kind of alarm somewhere.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Rumor has it that neither one of the George Bushes, neither "Poppy" nor "the Dim Son", could unhinge their wallets and send a donation to Andover Academy, the prep school that paved the way to their entry as legacy admissions to Yale.*

Since both of those clowns are rich in their own right and are also pulling in presidential pensions, that's pretty fucking pathetic.

_______________________________________________* "Legacy admission" = "the idiot offspring of an alumnus"

Friday, November 26, 2010

I'm really not. Cars, for me, are just transportation. I've tended to stick with Hondas because, if you maintain them, they are nearly as reliable as gravity.

But imagine, if you will, an extended-range hybrid that has a top end of 205MPH. Jaguar built it as a concept car. Even if they brought it into production, I'd have to hit a few major lotteries in order to afford one. All wheel drive (individual electric motors), 778 HP, 0-50 in a skosh over three seconds....yow!

I've never flown one, so I can't comment directly on how they fly. I did get a ride in one several years ago when I had to ferry my airplane from the Midwest to the East, a ride I try not to think about because it induces drooling.

One of the better ways to have started a flamewar back in the days of the Usenet "alt-dot" groups was to go to an aviation usegroup and ask: "Which is better, a Money or a Bonanza?"*

Mooney Aircraft made very fast airplanes. They also had a willingness to push the envelope on design and performance, even if they failed (the Mustang and the PFM).

The Mooney Acclaim, a/k/a the Mooney 20TN, will outrun any other production single piston-engined civilian aircraft there is and is one of the few singles that will comfortably cruise at over 200kts. The original Mooney 20 had a 150HP engine and wooden wings. The wooden wings went away with the M20C and the M20TN has a 280HP engine.

It's a damnable shame that the airplane is going out of production.

______________________* My sense of it was that Mooneys were more like sports cars and Bonanzas were more like Crown Vics.

If you exercise your First Amendment rights, that makes you a terrorist. No, that is not a question, anymore, it is a frakking statement of fact.

No doubt that soon it will be considered to be a terrorist act to own a gun (2nd Amendment), keep soldiers from living in your house (3rd Amendment), tell the cops they have to show you a search warrant (4th Amendment), exercise your right to remain silent (5th Amendment), have the right to cross-examine witnesses against you (6th Amendment) or not be tortured (8th Amendment).

So it has come to this: Protesting peacefully is an act of terrorism. Hunter S. Thompson was right when he wrote this 38 years ago:

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."*

We have become a nation of fearful pantswetters when all it takes is organizing screenings of a movie to get one labeled as a terrorist.

40 or so years ago, my youngest brother asked my (now deceased) father why Republican politicians were so against funding education. Dad (who had voted for Tricky Dick) said that people who have not been well educated, who have not been taught how to think critically, were more easily led and were more susceptible to propaganda.

So here we are now, with a population that is falling behind other nations on virtually every educational metric that there is. We have large segments of this population that will go around screaming "Obama is a communist" without any conceivable idea what communism was. We have a political party that has national candidates which are aggressively ignorant and proud of the fact that they don't know a damned thing. Understanding and conclusions based on facts are deemed by them to be "elitist". As my father foresaw, we have a country where tens of millions of people swallow political propaganda whole, without applying any critical thought to it.

And if you challenge their views, some of them indeed will be roused to violence.

I weep for this country.

(H/T)
____________________________________* My apologies to used car salesmen on this one.

Note that the two reporters who wrote the story were unable to understand that the "opt out" protests were based on the use of the full-body scanners and if the scanners weren't used, there was nothing to opt out of.

That's a 12lb bird, the smallest they had in the store. At 47 cents/lb, it's cheaper than most chickens. Yeah, I know that there are "heritage turkeys" that supposedly taste better, but at ten times the cost, that makes them food for "employed well-off yuppies", of which I am zero for three this time.

I pulled the foil off it a little too late, so it's not terribly browned, but ecch, so what. I now just have to keep an eye on it so George doesn't get up and taste it. I'm doing baked potatoes, veggies and bread and that is it. Probably 80% of the meat will become baggied-up for sandwiches and whatnot.

Enjoy your meal!

Update:

Ready to go to the table:

And it was good. The cats that wanted some turkey got some.

I may not have a job this Thanksgiving, and maybe the prospects aren't so hot. It is what it is. I have my health, a roof over my head and my cats. I'm not destitute. My immediate family and my friends are in good health. So there is much to be thankful for this year.

For some obscure reason, my father's favorite holiday was Thanksgiving. One year, he invited all of both his and my mother's relatives who lived within a two hour's drive. That was a shitload of people, maybe 40 or so.

Mom, of course, was less than amused at having to ramrod the feeding of the extended tribe. Mom's stove was the traditional electric 1960s one with four burners and an oven. She didn't have a "radarange," as microwave ovens were called, back then. I wasn't exactly a lot of help, since my cooking talents stubbornly remained about at the level of being able to set fire to anything I tried to cook, including hardboiled eggs.

It was a madhouse. There was a fireplace in the dining room and the living room, for it was an old house. The chandelier in the dining room was a wrought-iron affair with a dozen candles. Dad built roaring fires in both fireplaces and, of course, the candles were lit. There were two tables in the living room, a "kiddie table," with both the children and their parents, and a "teen table."

One of my cousins, who was about four, was running around the house, raising Cain. The cousin who was his mother was oblivious. My mom finally yelled out "will someone do something about [name deleted]?" I grabbed him as he ran by me and hoisted him up by the front of his shirt so he was level with me. I snarled in his face "siddown and shaddup or die!" He was pretty quiet after that. When he started to act up, all I had to do was glare at him and he quieted right back down. My grandmother was her usual cheery self, sighing and saying "I wish I was dead," which was her typical proclamation at any sort of festivities.

As the meal progressed, having two fires burning and 40 people eating turned out to not be the wisest idea, as the temperature of the rooms began approaching that of a sauna. It was a cold afternoon, snow was lightly falling, and we had to open the windows to cool the place down.

It was a delightful meal. There wasn't much fighting. One cousin kvetched that, because she had had another baby, that she was going to be sitting at the kiddie table for another six years. There was more than enough food to go around, and everyone had a pretty good time. After dinner, we (the older kids) cleared the table of the dinner dishes and then served coffee and dessert, which was three kinds of pie. A few of the adults were smoking cigarettes.

TSA bashing is all the rage and, in large measure, for good reason. TSA provides good security theater at a high cost.

Some of it, unfortunately, is just the way things have to be. The world has changed since the days when you could board an airliner with the same aplomb as getting on a commuter train.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that a terrorist does manage to bring down an airliner. Al Qaeda has tried as far back as fifteen years ago to blow up airliners. They have not succeeded in bringing one down with explosives, but some day they might.

What will the reaction from the politicians now demanding that the TSA be dismantled? Will Ron Paul say "that's the price of freedom"? Will John Mica say "there is only so much that can be done"?

Sure they will, and goats will write novels.

When al Qaeda tries to bring down another passenger airliner, whether or not they succeed, the politicians will rush to the television cameras to demand that the Federal government do "something" to prevent another attack. The very same politicians now who are calling for the TSA to be torn to bits will want heads to roll for whatever security failure, whether real or perceived, was exploited by the terrorists. And they will bleat and whine about that without one twinge of self-consciousness over their blatant hypocrisy.

I'd love to see a reporter ask them what will they tell the American people if the TSA stops screening folks and then a bomb does go off, but that's a question that a local reporter will have to ask. None of the national reporters have the guts.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of a Bell helicopter approaching from off in the distance. The sound of a Bell "Huey" type helicopter, with the "whapping" sound made by its two long rotor blades, is very distinctive.

It was loud enough to rattle my bedroom windows and given the lateness of the hour, it probably seemed a lot louder than it would have during the day. I got up and went to the bathroom, I could hear the sound of the rotor blades getting louder. Then the helicopter passed overhead and there was hardly a sound of it to be heard from it. What I heard, then, was the sound of the wind, as it was blowing hard and probably gusting at 30MPH or so.

A helo flying by in the middle of the night, fairly low and in conditions that would have made for a pretty nasty ride. That sounds like a medevac. I hope the patient made it.

Of course, DeLay says it was a "political persecution" (though I don't remember him speaking up about the Don Siegelman case and condemning that verdict). He'd be better advised to keep his mouth shut on that before the sentencing, unless he wants to talk his way into the prison system.

(Those gunshots? A bunch of executives at Carnival Cruises just offed themselves.)

The NYC subway system alone has 468 stations and carries about five million people a day. The entire NYC transit system carries over 7 million riders a day, 8 million if you add in the commuter lines. Total of subway and rail stations? 734, and that doesn't count bus stations (the buses carry 400,000 people a day over 80 routes and who knows how many bus stops).

The airlines, by comparison, carry (on average) 2 million passengers a day from less than 600 airports, and that number includes airports that have a few 19-seat puddlejumpers stopping by. The TSA would have to grow exponentially in order to cover the NYC mass transit system alone, let alone those in any other American city.

The TSA cannot scan and search everyone boarding the NC subway. It is the height of folly to even contemplate such.

A carrier is the "big stick". A LCS is comparatively a small twig, somewhere between a FFG and a PG, especially since the FFG-7s were pretty much neutered to being even less capable than the 1052s that were retired 15 years ago.

The problem, of course, is that the carrier force is slowly diminishing over time. They are hellaciously expensive to build and operate, especially when one factors in the costs of the aircraft. The first models of F-4s probably cost less than two million dollars a copy in 1960. That would be roughly $15 million today. In comparison, a F/A-18F Super Hornet costs $60 million and a F-35C will cost somewhere between $100 million and $200 million a copy, depending on which source you believe.*

Then again, the Navy had well over 20 carriers in 1960, most of which were left over from the Second World War. Now, the Navy has 11 with at least one in a multi-year refueling and overhaul at any one time. 10 available carriers means that there is, at most, five deployed at any one time, as the others are just returning from deployment, getting ready to deploy or undergoing intermediate maintenance. A "port and starboard" operating schedule is incredibly hard on the crews. 10 carriers properly means only three or four are deployed, so there is at least a smidgen of reserve capability.

The big ship-small ship debate has been going on since the dawn of our Republic. Small ships have their uses. But there are times when sending a flotilla of small ships is like bringing a BB gun to a real gunfight. Small ships don't send much of a message, which is why when there is trouble in the world, one of the first question that gets asked in Fort Fumble and in the West Wing is: "Where are the carriers now?"

______________________________* It is worth remembering that the F-22, at $200 million a copy (or less) was canceled in favor of the "cheaper" F-35.

I don't know what it is about the New York Times. For a paper that is so hated by the conservatives, it seems to spend a lot of its space functioning as a PR conduit for the security agencies.

Exhibit A: This piece in today's paper, which puts forth the TSA's party line of "we're only trying to keep you safe," says that the only problem with what the TSA refers to as "enhanced pat-downs" (what the rest of us refer to as "groping") is that the TSA didn't handle the PR aspect of it with any skill.

So here is the New York Times, shilling for the TSA to persuade the sheeple to shut up and suck up.

First off, whenever a government agency refers to something as "enhanced", that is a euphemism for something very bad. "Enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for torture, "enhanced pat-down" is a euphemism for a sexual assault.

Third, the TSA's quest for the utmost in security is at odds with the rest of the nation's conduct. The TSA will leave no testicle unfelt to "keep you safe", but we willingly accept risk for almost everything else. Speed-limit cameras unquestionably reduce speeding, but they are widely despised. Nobody seriously questions that helmet laws save lives, but then you see these birds:

The TSA's quest for total security on airliners is futile. They certainly aren't going to get there by paying a skosh over burger-flipping wages (they start at $12.85) and employing tactics that border on voodoo, since the TSA seems to think that a terrorist will have shifty eyes.

Of course, the TSA likes to gloss over one of the commonalities of both the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber: Both attacks originated overseas.

Of course, this is an area where the state governments are letting the "free market" between the dentists and the X-ray machine makers determine things. That means what matters is how many machines the makers can sell and how many patients the dentists can con into having X-rays.

Nobody seems to care whether or not being subjected to more and more X-rays into your mouth is good for you.

Consider this, there was about as much time between the introduction of the Boeing 40 and the Boeing 737 as there has been since the introduction of the 737 and today.

The 737 is still in production. More 737s have been made than any other commercial airliner in history,* other than the DC-3 (and that was due to wartime production).

The 737 has a lengthy book of orders, it continues to evolve, and it may indeed eventually surpass the DC-3 in numbers made.
____________________*Yes, I know there were more An-2s made, but they were not exactly made under a commercial sales regime.

Al Qaeda has shown that they do not have to cause any physical damage or hurt a soul in order to provoke the Federal government into costly countermeasures. All they have to do is sneak a guy onto an airplane with some PETN; he doesn't have to blow it up, just get caught. The DBP will do the rest.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Boeing lined up its jet aircraft models from the 707 to the 777, from right to left:

The second aircraft from the right is a 717. If that "717" is a Boeing aircraft, then I'm the illegitimate daughter of the Queen of England. That "717" is as much a Boeing aircraft as is a DC-3:

The "717" is an updated Douglas DC-9:

The DC-9 begat the MD-80 (as by then McDonnell Aircraft had merged with Douglas Aircraft), which begat the MD-90, which begat the MD-95. The MD-95 was redesignated the Boeing 717. It wasn't as offensive when McDonnell-Douglas redesignated the DC-9 as one of their models, as McDonnell had not been making airliners.

Since Boeing numbered their series sequentially, there was a real 717. That was the airframe which was used for the KC-135 Stratotanker:

The 717 has the same cabin width as Boeing's first prototype, the 367-80:

The "Dash 80" had room for five seats abreast, but most airlines wanted six and six-abreast seating was what they got. Howard Hughes, who owned TWA, thought five-abreast seating was preferable and one airliner manufacturer, Convair, made what Hughes wanted.

The Convair 880 was faster than either the DC-8 or the 707, but it was not as profitable for the airlines. The 880 and its even faster derivative, the 990, went out of production in very short order with possibly 100 or so of both types produced. Convair lost a shitload of money on its 880 and 990 models, which killed off Convair as a manufacturer of civilian aircraft. In comparison, Boeing made over 1,000 707 variants and Douglas made over 500 DC-8s.

One airplane is missing from the Boeing photo lineup: the 720:

The 720 was a shorter and lighter version of the 707 with a slightly redesigned wing for better short-field performance. Boeing probably made about as many 720s as Convair made 880/990s, but since Boeing didn't have to make a lot of changes to the 707 design to produce the 720, they likely didn't lose their shirt over it. The 720s pretty much disappeared from major airline service once the 727s began to appear.

Gracie is in the foreground, Rocky is behind her. They had the same mother and they were born about 16 months apart.

Which means that they don't recognize each other as siblings. It is unusual for them to be this close to one another without growling and hissing. Rocky had jumped up into the chair about three minutes before I had taken the photo. Grace jumped down about three minutes after I took the shot.

I have a few handguns which are suitable for concealed carry, but I always seem to default to one of two:

A Taurus 85 .357:

Or a Series 80 Colt Government Model:

Both mostly ride in inside-the-waistband holsters. To get an idea of how much of the weapon comes above the waistband, draw a line that bisects the weapon just behind the trigger guard. The Taurus shows very little and it disappears under a slightly oversized t-shirt. While it is a .357, I load it with .38+P semi-wadcutters, which was the old FBI load before they shifted to automatics in the 1980s. I've not customized it in any way.

For the Colt, I replaced the factory wrap-around neoprene grips with the more traditional (and thinner) wood grips from another Colt. I switched the sights with slightly larger and more usable Wilson fixed sights, which had some sharp edges and which I had to "de-horn". I also installed a Commander-style hammer and a beavertail grip safety to make it more friendly to my hand. The only ammo I've found it doesn't like is Winchester "white box".

That's it? "It's necessary for thee but not for me (or John Boehner), so suck it up" is the best you can do, Barry? Mindless intrusion of personal liberties is what we expected from the last president. I had hoped that this president would be slightly different. (It is somewhat amusing to see Republican outrage on TSA groping, considering that they supported every security measure proposed by the Bush Administration and that "zOMG, the terrerists is gonna kill us" has been at the core of their political strategy for years.)

The Optica was designed to be an observation aircraft. The prototype first flew in 1979. Powered first by an O-360 Lycoming engine and later by an O-540, which drove a ducted fan, the Optica was touted as having the observational visibility of helicopter with the lower operating costs, lower noise and longer flight duration of an airplane.

Nothing like this has happened in New York, which has its own collection of bigoted assholes, as you can see by perusing the comment thread on the Daily News article. After all, New York elected former terrorist symp Peter King as a congressman.

The TSA's problem with amputees and people with medical devices is grounded in two of the TSA's operating assumptions: 1) All passengers are terrorists until proven otherwise; and 2) all TSA screeners are imbeciles with non-functioning cerebellums. If you take those two assumptions into account, then everything that the TSA does will make sense. That is why, when some discretion and/or common sense would seem to be required, the TSA is utterly lacking.

But if you are a powerful member of Congress, like John Boehner, you don't have to bother with being screened.

Funny how the Confederate party drops its dedication to states' rights when the banksters tell them to. The banksters deliberately ignored state statutes on recording mortgages, now they want Congress to make their shoddy practices, if not outright fraudulent conveyances legal.

Congress should tell them to go fuck themselves. But they won't, for between the Confederate party's fealty to the banksters as well as enough Democrats who are more than willing to do the dirty work for those unindicted felons, this end-run around state recording statutes will probably work.

If there is any example more illustrative of the fact that our government is for sale, I don't, offhand, recall what it could be.

Chertoff isn't appearing as an expert on airport security when he discusses full body scanners; he is appearing as a paid pitchman. When you see Chertoff talking about body scanners, think of what the infomercial would look like (starring the late Billy Mays, of course) and you will have the full flavor of what is going on.

Congressmean Mica, a man who thinks that government intrusion is bad (unless he wants the government to intrude, that is), wants all pilots to carry an FAA-issued photo ID in addition to the other forms of government issued photo ID that pilots carry.

Yes, all pilots are required to carry government-issued photo ID already, per FAR 61.3. But that makes no nevermind to Rep. Mica. One therefore has to wonder what company is ready to make the IDs and whether they gave him a hefty bribe campaign contribution.

You can read the rule here. You can comment on the inanity of the rule here.

If you do leave a comment, keep it clean and non-Tea-partyish, please.

It is appearing that, thanks to contractor delays, the guest cats will be here until at least after Thanksgiving. Fortunately, the drama has subsided; the guest cats and the resident cats are doing a world-class job of ignoring each others' existence.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Wear a loose top, like an oversized t-shirt. Women should wear a loose skirt with an elastic waist. Guys can wear loose pants or kilts (they were good enough for Mel Gibson, at least before he became a drunken, foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semite).

Then, if you are selected for a TSA groping, just whip those suckers off. Undergarments would be a good idea to avoid a charge of indecent exposure.

The problem there, of course, is that the rent-a-cops will have to grope you to TSA standards and given that they will be making minimum wage to feel you up, the job will attract a whole host of Level III sex offenders. Because nobody who has the smarts to figure out how to run a french-fryer at McDonalds will want to grope people for a living.

(H/T for the flag)
____________________________* Many of which gave large bribes campaign contributions to Mica.

All of a sudden, I've been getting emails that ask for reciprocal blog links. I've been blogging about this and that for a few years now and never got much in the was of requests. But now they're coming in a steady stream and they all tend to look like this:

Hello friend,

Your Site is very much interesting.

I am your regular reader of your blog. I follow your blog. I am able to get all the information from links in your blog as well as by following external links from your blog.

I like your way of posting. I Have added http://eb-misfit.blogspot.com/ in my blog http://xxxxxxxxxxxxx.blogspot.com/ . I am honored to add it to My Friend's Blogroll section.

So if you could provide me a link to my blog, it will be much more useful for users.

Hope you would add my blog in your blog. I would certainly appreciate a link from your blog.

My URL: http://xxxxxxxxxxxxx.blogspot.com/

Thanks for visiting my blog as well! Please reply friend

Regards

Does anybody know what the hell is going on? They aren't lying about this; when I check, my blog is listed. But this all seems kinda creepy. Besides, being addressed as "friend" by someone I don't know makes me think of that sleazy trader on "the Trouble with Tribbles," and I have impulses to both verify that I still have my wallet and draw heat.

What is their angle? If you are an active blogger, are you seeing the same crap?

So, by Army logic, if they destroy the homes of ten thousand Afghan families, that will bring them all closer to our side because they will all file for compensation.

That's bullshit, of course. What it does is swell the ranks of Taliban sympathizers. Every one of those families whose homes and fields are blown up the by Army will become a family with people who will cheer when they hear of an American soldier dying.

The FDIC has about fifty criminal investigations underway on failed banks. The bad thing is that criminal investigations of the banking collapse that do not lock up a goodly number of people from both the big banks and that nest of vipers known as Goldman Sachs will be rather incomplete. But you bet they'll find a few people who worked for some small-time banks in Georgia to throw into prison.

Doesn't matter a fuck that for the last sixty years, it has been the practice in hard times to extend unemployment benefits. Doesn't matter a shit that unemployment benefits are stimulative, since damn few unemployed people can afford o save anything.

No, now, after eight years of going along with the Bush deficits, now Republicans feel a need to do something about the deficit. And when Republicans want to "do something" about Federal deficits, their targets are always the programs who help people who have fallen on hard times. But whisper the magic words "tax breaks for the rich", and you will see those same deficit hawks stumbling over themselves to vote "yea", no matter how much those tax breaks increase the deficit.

So if you are unemployed in this holiday season, go and properly thank a Republican politician or pundit for their concern and caring. (Do try not to injure them too badly, though.)

The satire of the extended Palin campaign commercials starts at 5:00 into this, but it's worth watching the entire thing.

Update: Odd, it was there earlier this morning. You can still see the clip at the Daily Show's website, but the link and embedded code now goes to South Park. I took down the video until whatever is wrong at Comedy Central is fixed.

Now the embed code goes to the Colbert Report. Weird. I'm guessing that one of the web weenies at CC is from Bayonne and didn't find it to be very funny.

Fuck you very much for sending it now, rather than a month ago, when it might have done some good for the senators and congressmen who cast the hard votes to save this country and who were punished by a horde of ignorant yahoos for doing that.

Fuck you very much for sending it, now rather than in the summer of 2009, when it might have made a difference in tamping down the yelling and screaming of those spoiled brats in the Tea party.

But no, you had to send your thank-you note when it would have no practical effect whatsoever.

Tell you what: How about if TSA and DHS put an airline-type screening area in their headquarters. Every political appointee and SES-level employee at TSA and DHS would get the full enhanced screening every time they went into the headquarters building. The TSA scanners would be rotated in and out weekly from airports around the country. There would be video cameras set up, open to all on the Internet, so everyone could see that the screenings were truly being done.

TSA and DHS officials would also be forbidden from flying on government aircraft. If they need to go somewhere, they fly commercial with the dreaded SSSS code automatically printed on their boarding passes.

If this security regimen is so good for us, let us see the DHS and TSA brass live with it as well.

I bought a $100 Mosin a couple of years ago. I had two already, but as I went through the rack in the gunshop, I could see that it was a former sniper rifle. The bore was nice and the trigger felt fine, so I bought it.

I took it to the county range over the weekend. Bad mistake, the 100 yard benches were full up. 200 yard spots were open, so I took one. Second mistake: All I had for spotting was a pair of 10x binoculars and they were not up to the task of spotting .3" holes in paper at 200 yards.

The good news is that a nice gent let me look into his spotting scope and the rifle shot about a 4" group, which is pretty sweet for open sights at that distance. The bad news is that it shot way high and way to the right, about 1/2 of the way between the outer edge of the black bull and the top right corner of the target.

Re-snipering it is not in the cards these days. Reproductions of the scope itself are over $300. Reproduction mounts, when I have seen them offered, are also over $300. And then it all has to be put together by someone who knows what they are doing, and by then the cost is over an AMU ("aircraft maintenance unit", aka a grand).

That's not going to happen anytime soon. Pushing the sight over and installing a higher post, that's doable.

It has nothing to do with security. It has everything to do with keeping the sheeple in line. Which is one reason why the bozo in charge of the TSA at the San Diego airport is questioning the patriotism of anyone who does not want their bodies X-rayed. It is why the Chief Thug of the TSA is reaching out to reporters to spread the message that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear and that everything will go smoother if everyone shuts up and does whatever the TSA demands.

On another email list, one of the members said that while they would like to speak out against the outrages being perpetrated by the TSA, to do so meant running the risk of being flagged for fucking with at any TSA checkpoint or being put on a no-fly list.

Not speaking out for fear that the organs of state security are going to fuck with you is a hallmark of an authoritarian state, not a free nation.

NATO is an organization that, as far as I can see, has largely outlived its usefulness.

NATO, when it was formed, had one clear objective: To unite the nations of western Europe militarily in order to prepare for and deter an attack by the Soviet Union. It also had one unstated objective, which was to ensure that Germany did not become militarily dominant.

The prime reason for NATO's existence became obsolete two decades ago, when the Soviet Union crumbled and the Cold War ended. Nations of both the old Warsaw Pact and some of the new nations that were formerly Soviet republics have joined NATO. At the same time, the Russian defense establishment fell apart under its own weight.

Most of the old Soviet navy has rusted away at anchorage. What warships remain in service are largely ships build in Soviet times. Russian shipyards cannot build a reliable nuclear submarine, as the fiasco of the construction of the K-152/INS Chakra has shown. Russian shipyards cannot build a serviceable amphibious landing ship, which is why the Russian navy is buying them from the French.

The Russian army is not much better. The Russian army reportedly has both poorly-aid and barely trained draftees (draft-dodging is a large-scale sport in Russia) and better trained volunteers, who are in different units. Supposedly it was the volunteer units which rather effortlessly rolled up the Georgians two years ago. Their equipment is largely Soviet-era design.

More to the point, the Russian army (except for the forces in Kaliningrad), is 800 miles further to the east than it was two decades ago. The Russian army does not have the capability to roll across the Northern European Plain. Still, the old "Cold Warriors", largely conservative men who cannot accept the reality that the Soviet Union had collapsed, have hung on ever since, hyping the so-called Russian threat.

The so-called Russian threat, at least to the core nations of NATO, has not existed for two decades.

You might recall that the Turks recoiled from a similar "gift" proposal from the Bush Administration, which the Bush Administration proffered to get Turkey to let the U.S. Army stage part of the Iraq War from Turkish soil. Many Turks rightly considered the offer of additional aid to be a bribe and it wasn't accepted.

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.